In recent years data have been collected on conductive thermal-conirol paints, such as PCBZ and NS43G, in order to evaluate their stability to the space environment. In addition to being considered for spacecraft thermal conirol, the paints have been considered as an alternate material for use within on-orbit calibration systems. For example, several NASA/ Earth Observing System (EOS) and European Space Agency (ESA) instruments to be flown later this decade will require near-lambertian, bright, and spatially uniform surfaces to reflect sunlight into their camera fields-of-view. This will provide both an absolute calibration, by knowing the magnitude of the reflected light, and flat-field pixel-to-pixel comparisons within an instrument Data are summarized here, as collected by the Cassini, Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR), and the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) projects. Properties evaluated include absorpiance, reflectance factor, electrical conductivity, thermal cycling, resistance, and environmental exposure stability. Finally, the suitability of thermal paints for calibration applications are compared to Spectralon, as the latter material is baseline for many next-generation remote sensing systems.
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